Just wanna say I think Gentoo is a fantastic distro. Keep up the good work.

Enough of that

When using my Gentoo box (or any other Linux distro for that matter), or, perhaps I should say, when NOT using my box (or maybe waiting many, many hours for something to compile), the screen will blank itself out after ~15 minutes. I would like to shut this feature off, does anyone know how? I have tried killing apmd, even shutting off power management at CMOS level. I don't know what's next.

It's a "term thing"! the variable is "blank". I'm using "BSD style init", (Slackware) so the setting is in /etc/rc.d/rc.M , which is the initialization script for the "multi user" modes. I assume that the Sys-V style has a similar script somewhare. The line to look for is:
/bin/setterm -blank 15
Simply comment it out by inserting a "#" at the beginning of the line, OR change the "15" to "0" and it's gone for everybody.
If you just want to disable it on a "per user" basis,
/bin/setterm -blank 0
at the command prompt after you log in should do it.
Check the manpage for "setterm" for all kinds of goodies!
man setterm
at the command prompt.